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amazing, ancient, answer, ask, asking, blog, cause, cause and effect, define, differentiation, dillemma, discovery, effect, explore, fall, falls, falls in the forest, fluctuations, forest, hard question, inconsistency, interesting, logic, logical answer, microphone, morning shorts, mystery, never, old, original, other words, overlook, person, philosopher, philosophers, philosophical, problem, produced, provoke thought, question, question and answer, ready, recording, response, sound, sound wave, tree, understanding, who, yeah
The most well known philosophical question forbade knowledge of its answer to ancient thinkers, only to reveal its answer with a single invention. What is the answer? Yes, if a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound regardless of a person present to sense it. Why? It is because we can remotely record it and play it back… Are there still problems with the answer? Of course, aren’t there always in philosophy? Ready? I don’t care…
The first problem is the question that is being answered. The recording solution only replies to the question, “If a tree falls and nobody is around, does it ever make a sound?” In order to know if it always makes a sound, we would have to record the fall and as many times and at every time that a tree could fall or would fall. However, this differentiation is not a problem because of an assumption made by the asker. Although the asker is tackling the concept of inconsistency of a cause resulting in an effect depending on whether a person is present or not, they overlook the possibility of inconsistency when there is no person. In other words, although they explore the possibility of the tree not making a sound when there is nobody around, they don’t explore the possibility of it sometimes making a sound and sometimes not. For this reason the asker said, “does it make a sound?” It is also possible that they would accept the answer, “sometimes,” if it only make the sound sometimes… but then the question couldn’t be answered by this method without recording every instance a tree would fall with nobody near it… and who likes questions that can’t be answered? Oh yeah… ancient philosophers.
There is also an issue with the physics of the sound an the recording. Since the microphone only senses the waves of air, which we hear as sound, it is possible that without anyone to hear it, no sound is produced, only air fluctuations. Maybe the resonating waves caused by the tree can only be called sound when there is someone to sense it with their ears. Then the question is not, “does it make a sound,” but “what is the dictionary definition of sound used by the asker?”
The original purpose of this question was to provoke thought. Even now, with advances in technology, we still cannot answer the question. It is like asking, “if a comet passes in front of a star, does it still twinkle?” In fact, this question would be more exciting to answer because if gives more solid responses and is scientifically answerable. So a better likening would be to the question, “if a caterpillar enters a soap bubble (3 inches in diameter), is it still fuzzy?” Even if we got to feel the caterpillar in the bubble, we would still need to know the asker’s definition of the word “fuzzy.” But who likes questions that can’t be answered, anyway? Oh yeah… ancient philosophers. They would have hated microphones and dictionaries…